Antique & Classic Cars Blog

I was talking to my half brother last night, with whom my wife and I and cousins were supposed to have dinner. We canceled because of the snow—too hectic for driving . . .  Minnesotans nixing a family get-together because of a few inches of snow.

This got us laughing about how soft we all are in the 21st century. When our grandfather was little, kids rode to school in a horse-drawn sleigh. On one trip, the sleigh cornered fast and my grandfather, of earliest school age and wrapped in a bear-skin blanket, fell out. Nobody realized it until they got to school, so the driver looped around, backtracked and found him in a snow bank.

We had a relative who was blind. Year round, into her 90s, she followed a rope tied between the back of the house and the barn to milk cows.

Our mother’s grandfather did logging work. He’d ride the logs from Taylors Falls to Stillwater, buy a 50-pound sack of flour and walk back to Center City with it, using it as a pillow when he slept en route. Sure, he may have gotten a lift once in a while, but that doesn’t make his life easy.

So would our forebears, working with their hands, traveling by foot usually—by horse or open cart as a luxury, have skipped a family get-together because they’d have to sit a bit longer in their toasty, high-powered car with its miraculous dark-piercing headlights, sculpted form-fitting seats and concert-grade stereo?

—Probably, but only if they’d been in our time long enough to become as soft as we are.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Car stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.